Are you all brainwashed…

‘Cause thats what I’m looking for.

Go artificial life form researchers go!

(Just to clarify, I’m a different Alex than the Alex thats been posting previously, but I won’t clarify further by appending my name.)

Come back to me when you create something out of nothing (no hydrogen, no carbon, no heat, no DNA).

Then you can say you have created a new life form.

Otherwise its just re-adjusting the building blocks that some other dude created.

PS: keep up the good work though – sounds interesting

118. Allah did curse him, but he said: “I will take of Thy servants a portion Marked off;

119. “I will mislead them, and I will create in them false desires; I will order them to slit the ears of cattle, and to deface the (fair) nature created by Allah.” Whoever, forsaking Allah, takes satan for a friend, hath of a surety suffered a loss that is manifest.

120. Satan makes them promises, and creates in them false desires; but satan’s promises are nothing but deception.

THE HOLY QURAN CHAPTER 4, VERSES 117-120

7 years *is* a lot of time – and other people have pointed out it’s often even longer for many patents.

If you’re going to present this as a potential boon for humanity – which I would agree with – then surely you’d want it to advantage the most people possible, in the quickest timeframe.

If he patents it – even if he’s having research done, there’s many global organisations that could work on it all at once, were it not patented and available for them to work on. This would be quicker, and in the end, better for more people. I’m not saying he shouldn’t be adequately compensated, nor am I suggesting I know more than the law makers… Though often I wonder just how much those who legislate do really know.

But there’s lots of medicines out there that could do a lot of good. I’m from Australia here and here there’s an atypical antipsychotic drug that gets prescribed for schizophrenia, it’s based on a different chemical, works differently with neurotransmitters and holds some serious potential to help a lot of people…

Well it would be prescribed for it. Except it costs about AU$144000 (About US$115000) per year to stay medicated with. How many schizophrenics do you know that can afford that? Every comparable medication with generic forms available doesn’t even fall in the same kind of price league. As soon as there is competition, the price drops dramatically. A patent ensures there is no competition for a long time.

I realise the people want to recover research money etc… But big developments need to have someone (WHO maybe?) fork over some money straight away and basically say “we need this – it can help people” then get cracking on actually helping people.

While I won’t go extensively into this particular pet peeve of mine, I’ll just point out the fact that Big Money companies routinely pour money into congress attempting to get those times lengthened – knowing that from time to time they’ll succeed with the right congressional makeup. Just look at copyright law if you don’t believe me – Disney “bought” a 20 year extension over its hold on some of their earliest works (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono_Copyright_Term_Extension_Act). We all know the right amount of money can do it again…

In addition its common in the bio-sciences industry to patent the discovery twice for a total of 28 years. This is done by first patenting the procedure and then patenting the results of the procedure or vice versa. US patent law allows this. In the past 3 years or so many universities have begun to play this cleaver game too.

There is no such thing as an international patent even though its generally possible to apply for patents in all WTO (World Trade Organization) member countries with one form. However each country has a different number of active patents so its virtually impossible for a patent to be active in every country. Different countries have from a few hundred to 60,000+ active patents.

Interestingly there’s no correlation between the number of patents and a country’s development. Both China and South Korea (a very developed country) have relatively few patents.

In any case, what it means is that any company that wants to use a given patent needs only establish a subsidiary company in a country where the impeding patent doesn’t exist. Patent law in most countries allows anyone (after a year) to patent any innovation regardless of whether they invented it or not so in all likelihood there will be at least a dozen companies patenting this same discovery around the world.

The point, however, is that there is absolutely no reason why one should grant patents for computer processors but not for creating an artificial life-form.
It is only an unreflective “gut feeling” reaction, which doesn’t withstand rational scrutiny. It’s not like he will own the patent for ever.

It is probably true that some sort of regulatory oversight would be useful, but nothing completely paranoid — after all humans have done genetic engineering for centuries.

7 years is a very long time in a world where technology changes so quickly. It’s too long for someone to have a patent on something so potentially important.

First of all, there’s plenty of ways to make bombs – but we still love our nukes right? You might say it’s a different case, because nuclear weapons are significantly more powerful than others. But I daresay this is similar in this situation. The potential to completely change an entire species? The possibilities are absolutely awe inspiring.

A new toy for the big boys to play around with. It’s got a lot of potential to do good – and thats how they’ll sell it to us. But that being said, is there really very many people who actually can profit from benevolance? We’ve got a race with a lot of stupid people and a lot of very self interested people.